Your business depends on its online presence — principally its website — either for credibility, lead generation, SEO, eCommerce, or any number of reasons. However, many companies would be surprised to learn that they own only some parts of their online presence. So, while they thought they had been paying for and building their digital assets, they might not be physically or legally theirs.
This happens more than you might imagine, and many companies lose their websites, email accounts (along with years of email history), and domain names…all in the blink of an eye, usually without remedy or recourse. Your business needs to own your digital assets or risk losing them forever.
Three Examples of Why You Need to Own Your Digital Assets
When a company or organization starts developing its digital presence, it can seem overwhelming and feel like uncharted waters. So, a common path is to partner with a web vendor to do the technical stuff while the organization focuses on what it knows best: operating the business.
Like any industry, competent, honest web developers, as well as unskilled scammers, exist. Let’s examine three cases involving the low end of the spectrum, illustrating why you need to own your digital assets.
Garage Door Company Loses The Website, Domain Name…Everything!
The first example deals with a local garage door company. The owner wanted a web presence and eventually hired a web developer offering a comprehensive package. The package included website design, hosting, maintenance, and the domain name. The owner became dissatisfied with the vendor’s performance and broke off the relationship. When she asked for the domain name, she was told to “pound sand” in so many words. Since the vendor owned the domain name and was being a less-than-ethical person, there was no way she could recover that digital asset.
Fledgling Financial Services Company Loses Its Hosting
An individual was developing a new financial services subsidiary for his parent company. Given the situation, it seemed logical to work with the same web developer and host the parent company used. The arrangement allowed the person building the new business to focus his energies there while the company’s developer ran with creating the website.
As happens in the business world, the parent company and the developer/hosting company began to have problems, bad blood developed, and the parent company canceled their contract with the vendor. Part of the fallout with the breakup was the financial services company website went down.
In this case, it took over a week to figure out how to restore the website, but you can imagine how damaging a failure like this looks to a customer using the firm’s financial services.
Real Estate Agent Loses His Website
A local real estate agent participated in his broker’s program that paid for brokerage agents’ websites. Many real estate agents do this because they believe these websites are better than building and owning their own websites and because they’d rather be closing deals than creating sites. And, at first, everything worked well: The agent could focus on his business while his broker-provided website provided visibility, listings, and other marketing support.
Eventually, the broker discontinued paying for the agents’ websites without any notice to its agents. When payments for the services stopped, everything vanished instantly.
Fortunately, this real estate agent owned his domain name, so as he built his new website from scratch, he could continue using a domain name already recognizable to his clients.
Digital Assets – Once They’re Gone, They’re Gone
It is possible to lose your online presence without any hope of recovering all or some of the digital assets that made it up. There are three reasons why this happens:
- Technical: The data, content, software, images, and everything digital are deleted when your website goes down. Once deleted, recovery borders on the impossible.
- Legal: Someone else owns the assets, including your domain name, email service, and other assets. Unless they are willing to sell, you are out of luck.
- You are dealing with an unethical person: If you break away from a vendor and leave on bad terms, that person may decide not to act ethically and refuse to give or sell you any assets or help you recover any part of your online presence.
What are Digital Assets?
The short answer to this question is “anything that makes up your website, supports communications with clients and stakeholders, enables e-commerce, and more.” Here’s a list of several digital assets:
- Domain Names: Your primary domain name and any related domains that protect your brand (e.g., Your-Company.com, and so on).
- Hosting Accounts: Web hosting services and any associated files and databases.
- Website Design and Content: All the text, images, videos, and other media on your website that you paid for or created yourself.
- Email Server and Accounts and Lists: Subscribers and email lists you’ve built over time.
- User Accounts: Access to accounts for team members, collaborators, and contractors who manage your digital presence.
- Social Media Accounts: Profiles and pages on platforms like Facebook, X, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
- Online Advertising Accounts: Accounts and data from Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and other online advertising platforms.
- Digital Products: E-books, online courses, software, and other digital products you’ve paid for or created.
- SEO Assets: Your Google Analytics (or other statistics) account, Search Console, Tag Manager, and so on.
- Software and Tools: Any software, plugins, and tools used to maintain your web presence.
- Directory Listings: Any listings you have on industry websites, local directories, and so on.
Tips for Preventing Losing Your Digital Assets
You can take steps to protect yourself and your organization from losing your digital assets. You can implement these from the beginning when you embark on a new development effort. If you already have a situation where someone else may own or control your assets, take steps to implement our recommendations.
- Always own your domain name and use or create a personal or corporate account at your registrar. Never trust a web developer to buy your domain for you.
- When you create your domain account, never use the email associated with that domain as the primary contact email. The same advice applies to creating a web hosting or email service account. Here’s why: If you do and that service gets interrupted, you can’t recover it because the service provider communicates using an email you can no longer access. Use a personal email address or one utterly unrelated to the domain name.
- Have a contract with your website developer that says that YOU own the site once the work is done and the work is paid for.
- Always own your email service account. It’s best that you host with something public, like Google Workspace (preferred), Outlook.com, or Office365.com, as these are very stable, independent service providers.
- Don’t use a website building service like Wix, Squarespace, or Godaddy Builder because you never own your site there. You just rent it. On the other hand, if you use WordPress, you own your site, and it’s portable, meaning you can host it nearly anywhere.
- Store periodic site backups to a location you control and in a format you can access. Google Drive, OneCloud, iCloud, and many other platforms are excellent options.
- Use two-factor authentication (2FA) or one-time codes on everything to safeguard your digital assets and make it harder for unsavory vendors to abscond with them.
- Own your social media accounts, treating them like your domain name and email address so you are guaranteed your organization can continue using the accounts you’ve worked so hard to develop.
The bottom line is simple: you must own your digital assets and be able to document your ownership by having them in your name and paying for them with your credit card. Why use your (or your company’s) credit card? Credit card information can be used to verify your ownership claim since you’ll know details like the card’s last five digits.
With West Hills Web, You Own Your Digital Assets
We hope this post clarifies why you need to own your digital assets. From the beginning, our policy has been that our clients own their digital assets, not ours. If you want to deal with a web developer who puts your needs first and helps you protect your digital assets, call us at 818-592-6370 or use our online contact form. We look forward to making your website unforgettable.
